


Roughing Up The Greatest Minds

by tayibahaji



Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 14:13:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13683324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tayibahaji/pseuds/tayibahaji
Summary: Eden being whomever.





	Roughing Up The Greatest Minds

"It is warmer by his side, and pain does not hurt the same when he smiles.  
He fights through the war like a true soldier. One that is loyal till the end.  
His family is gone, lost to the place beyond the skies, but it does not matter, for he remembers the first time they locked eyes.  
His eyes are lost and hurt whilst wandering over his own.  
No one knows why the wind howls as it does, he thinks it is a sign from the unknown."

\- Letters to The Unknown

**

His kindness was unusual and warm. Nothing anyone here had yet to encounter. He carried the burden of the others like a gentle parent. Eyes wide and kind, offering unrequited love and resolution. His innocence was one he had yet to encounter also. He did not laugh or grin at their perverted jokes. Though at times he would catch him laughing along, a struggling attempt to fit in, Eden suspected. He did not understand life before him, and had yet to figure out how it would be after him. But attempts were made, various of them.

This one was the first.

He called his name in the right way. The way the biblical figures of history had indented for it to be called out. Eden. It rolled of his tongue in a way he had yet to hear. He made it sound like a revelation in the night sky. Like yellow dandelion in the harshness of the cold years. Their friendship was the first to occur throughout the many years. He had realized he was his best friend on the day the sun never rose back up. The day the outside world had pushed them to the very edge of life itself. After losing all but a handful of their closest friends, their respected perceptions of life changed dramatically.

He engulfed him in a warm, tight hug after the beginning of the end. It was only when he pulled away that he realized it. Eden had hoped they could meet in the middle of it all, as a pair of stars aligned in the night sky. But it was not like that. It was never like that. They still laughed the same laughs. The one where you would have to clutch your stomach intensely, the ones you never wanted to end. Eden feared what life would be without the sacrifices they had made along the way. He swore once, that he would rather die than condone that kind of lie. But he did have a hard time accepting reality as the stars blurred together as one. He had said once that, that was the way he would want to depart from this world. In the hands of the person he loved the very most. He never gave it any thought, if it would be a beautiful woman whom he had carried for decades, or if it would be his best friend. Eden observed him intently as he proclaimed his love for the girl that had once betrayed him. The pure rage he felt directed towards that simple woman was extraordinary. He was not an angry person. Though he felt irritation and bitterness – he never felt anger. Anger belonged to the confused, the unstable and lost in this world. And he was everything but lost. Nonetheless, this woman had carried his greatest interest as carelessly as one would carry a piece of clothing. It was not until the second war that his heart broke for the second time. The woman had ruined him in the most inhumane way once more. Her regrets were never confessed, not that Eden cared. All that he cared about was the intense hatred he had for her, and the undeniable love he held for him. They moved on in respectable time. Though the moons appeared and departed, everything but the consistency changed. He sought out a way of escaping it all in the middle of July. By the end of October, he had fallen to the hardness of the brown liquor. Still, Eden loved him in every possible way one could love another individual. Though he had never confessed his love for him, he knew it was real. He knew it when he smiled, when he laughed, when he cried, when he was drunk off his mind, when he was locked behind the grey, steel bars. ‘I will never fall victim to the streets.’ he had said years before. His brother had after all been subject to the endless cycle, but here they were, contributing to society’s wrongful perceptions of the pair of them. 

“And that one?” Eden pointed up to the night sky. 

“Dedicated to the Goddess of Beauty and Love.” His hair had grown all too long for his normal ways, but Eden had a new profound love for it. He looked of his age when his hair reached his shoulders in that way, he thought to himself. Besides, Eden doubted there would ever be a look he could not pull off. 

“I’ll get a degree in Astrophysics, and then we’ll talk.” Though Eden was serious, his smile was contagious and made the both of them laugh. 

Some minutes passed before he spoke again. 

“Do you ever think about death?” 

His words were hollow, as if they had been pondering over themselves for days on end. 

Eden stared back at him. “It’s alright if you don’t really, I was just wondering,” His eyes were awfully vulnerable in that moment, Eden thought. As if he feared the subject more than he would have liked to let on. 

Eden chose his words wisely before speaking the truth. “I do sometimes, but I don’t worry much about it.”

“How come you worry about it?” Eden inquired. 

“How come you don’t?” He responded with a smirk lurking at his lips. 

“Because I know wherever I go, you’ll be with me.” They stopped moving for a split second. Only for one second. 

“Really?” His voice came out desperate then, as if he had been needing to hear those words for some time now. Perhaps since the night claimed the woman he had once loved. Eden felt his heart aching for the other boy then. Though death did not terrify him, he understood how it may have been challenging for him. So, when they continued gazing at each other Eden did the only thing there was left to do. 

“See those stars?” He pointed towards the bright, infinite beyond up in front of them. He chose those stars specifically, as he had once told him of these stars. How their story had been for a thousand years, and how it would remain for a thousand more. 

He nodded unsurely. 

“When all of this is over,” Eden began. 

‘When all of the pain is gone,’ was what he really wanted to say. 

“Where those four stars are aligned, that’s where we’ll meet, I promise.” 

The feeling of emptiness remains still. Though he filled the void in the greatest ways one could, the emptiness was consistent. ‘Moderation, subjectivity & recognition is key.’ Was what he had read once, a very long time ago. Eden wondered if he felt so empty because he had given all the pieces of himself to the ones he had loved throughout the years. His love had yet to be returned. Though the brown-eyed boy cared for him, he knew they could never be more than what they were. It was simply not in their nature to evolve from there on out. And he did not mind, truly. He would settle for the tiniest portion of love, if it meant that it was his love. The complications were consistent and made matters worse. They eventually made Eden feel like a body out of place, like a soul that did not belong walking amongst the living. 

”I’ll always be looking after you.” He spoke one summer night in June, the night sky clear up above them. 

”For all of eternity then?” Eden jokingly responded. 

He focused his eyes on Eden’s and spoke all too seriously then. 

”Maybe even after then.” 

He studied his features in the moon light. Though they both grew up together. His beauty only grew to be more radiant with time. By these days, his hair had fallen to his shoulders. He had pulled it up now to fit the appeal society had established some months ago. A light stubble was visible on his chin. All Eden wanted was to run his hands over it. Only once. And only so the feeling could linger on his fingers for days on end. He understood it was dangerous. Thinking such of his very best friend, but he could not help it. Or at least that’s what he told himself in the dead of the night. His unhealthy obsession with love never faded away. He carried it to the very end of the road. Where the pavement was hard against his soft body. He had dragged Eden from the place of the explosion to the point of no return. He could hear the words shouted at him, but it was as if they were not real. Shouted trough a time-line of all the moments in Eden’s life. As if he was only hearing them from afar. He lay quietly as his insides raged on. The pain was excruciating. Like a thousand knifes inching their way into your heart all at once. It was however, not the worst of pains. The worst came afterwards, when he felt a pair of arms encircling him in one last attempt of saving his physical being. Eden did not question why time moved as slowly as it did. He knew the minutes before them were few and sacred, so he observed intently as his greatest love cried over his corpse to be. Eden lifted his hands and signalized for him to end his life once more. Eden knew this was the end long before they reached the grey pavement. 

“I-I, I love you, you know that right?” The fierceness in that moment would have knocked Eden’s breath out, had he any left. Their eyes never moved from each other’s, and in that moment Eden knew he would never have to proclaim his love for the soul stood in front of him. Truthfully, he loved him in all the ways but one. He loved him for being his best friend, his comrade in this world’s horrid battles, for holding his body in his final moments, for caring for him after the third piece was lost to them, years prior. But most of all, he loved him for all which he could not explain. And though they would never know if it was fate or luck that had brought them together, the both of them settled for the certainty that the love they held for each other was real. The only way in which Eden did not love him was the one that would allow him to live on miserably, distraught, that he could not save his best friend. 

He nodded carefully at Eden then. 

No words spoken. 

No words needed. 

Several moments passed before Eden felt the pull. The feeling was strange, and unusual, but it did not terrify him half as much as it should have. Perhaps it was his eyes, calming Eden’s soul in his final moments. Or perhaps it was his words, echoing through the the infinite void of time and death, till they were nothing but one with his soul. 

”We’ll meet again after all of this, where the stars are aligned. ”


End file.
